Bitcoin Forum

8:00:19 > Rem ask 0.37073618 @ 8.8701
18:00:19 > Trade: 0.37073618 @ 8.87010
18:00:19 > Rem ask 0.09569056 @ 8.87003
18:00:19 > Trade: 0.09569056 @ 8.87003
18:00:18 > Rem ask 0.09417793 @ 8.86972
18:00:18 > Trade: 0.09417793 @ 8.86972
18:00:18 > Rem ask 0.02016005 @ 8.86972
18:00:18 > Trade: 0.02016005 @ 8.86972
18:00:17 > Rem ask 0.37073618 @ 8.86957
18:00:17 > Trade: 0.37073618 @ 8.86957
18:00:17 > Rem ask 0.01905459 @ 8.86917


What's wrong with this picture :)

Trade, remove ask???? WTF?!?

Either a bot's gone crazy, or the trading engine is fucked, but it's cycling in the same tiny range between 8.86 and 8.87....go see for yourself:

http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/order-book/
http://mtgoxlive.com/orders

Yeah, it’s fucking up my volume in SierraChart. Seriously, first the 6s trades, and then this.

I'm betting spam/psycho bot, there are some regular trades getting in between the madness......guess someone explained a logic paradox to the poor bot!

Something is borked. I suspect bot.

See last ~20 mins.

http://www.sierrachart.com/userimages/upload_2/1314638076873.png

is it a set of tiny bot buy orders?, or sell's created and just left like that, so when average joe tries to buy he has to go through the 1000's of tiny orders on the way up,

or something else intended to clog the system for others so they can make a particular move, could you use a trick like that to buy or sell into a "fake" bid wall, before it was removed? the people putting up the fake walls would normally see the price approach it and so remove it, but now they are so far back in the action cue they wont remove it in time?

Can't see any ask's being added, which does seem to pin the blame on the trading engine, but I really can't say, interestingly it's pumping volume and seems to be pushing a minor upward trend......wtfbbq :-X :-X :-X

I dunno....

It’s just a fucked up MtGox. Those trades aren’t actually executed anymore. (see depth on http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/order-book/)

It is one stupid loop of trades going on over and over again.

There is also the risk of ppl. putting in bids and asks at stale prices and overpaying.

Hehe,

It's generating it's own divergence!
http://derp.co.uk/26142

Quick everyone, this could be a sign! :p

Beautiful.

https://i.imgur.com/mibVs.png

Too bad it's not a full dollar loop!

Sure it is, those are not actual trades, it’s a loop of one trade sequence.

A loop that seems to be edging up slowly:
8.87118 when it started to 8.87786

Weird!

I don't know much about high frequency trading, but I saw that pattern in a ted talk a few weeks ago (around 6:20): http://www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html

He called it "the boston shuffler", but he didn't explain how it worked...

So.... did someone just sneak in a large buy without sending the price flying up???

hrmmm :/ weird one.

It ain't over yet, someone is trying to ratchet up and entice the chart readers to buy, 15 min RSI now buy signal, with 1K buy bid wall supporting.

Man, this sure is the wild west alright!

Here we go again.

https://i.imgur.com/DVQa9.png

Fuck you, MtGox, seriously. Fuck you for distorting the volume for the second time in two days. I think this should be considered market manipulation.

its not goxxed - what a stupid stupid bash !

mtgox is not the one who places hundreds of hundreds of 0.01/0.02 bid/asks / doing this loop. He just take the fee from this bored/dumb bot owner and thats his business, so for me no problem with this.

yesterday (on buying side) it took 1 hour and afterwards i've seen 2 walls with 10.000 US$ buying orders each, so even dumber than the bot owner, step in this trap - thought/take this as a buying sign.
The market corrected this ridiculous action afterwards.

so today its on the selling side. lets see what will happen.

*LeanBackTakeOutPopcorn

It is. Noone can execute any trades for hours while it is going on. Same as yesterday. People base their decisions on the false information (volume and price action) MtGox provides.

And no, I do not believe those are legitimate bot trades. It’s a looped sequence of someone selling into bot asks (whole bunch of small ones) caused by some MtGox bug. You can have a look at http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/order-book/ and see for yourself.

Even MagicalTux just confirmed it: [10:34:12] <MagicalTux> seems like the trade engine goes into an infinite loop

Stop your stupid fanboyism. I hate your kind.

The Sierra Charts feed is all weird.  It's like it's recycling the same trades over and over again, but the last price from my Sierra Chart feed is 8.78 and the last price on MtGox.com is 8.89.

The joys of MtGox in a single day.

http://www.sierrachart.com/userimages/upload_2/1314728899241.png

When the big guy's here there's a cheap algorithmic lab going on bitcoin, it's gonna be the rally of a millennium! :D

That chart sure is purrty!

Boston shuffler, son!

So basically anybody with enough money and bitcoins can get a bot and manipulate the market to their advantage, profit, and fuck the majority of other traders out there..  Cool.


I honestly think bitcoin is too small for bots.  I don't think bots should be allowed, and I think it would be advantageous to come up with a better method of determining a bitcoin's value and not solely base it on how much danny day trader and his bot want to buy/sell at today.

Yup, all it would take is a little fee.

The bot involvement is what makes bitcoin part of the currency of the future, as pretty much anyone can make a bot to compete with someone else's bot.  You can easily lose your money too with HFT, as has been shown in the 2008 crash.

If bitcoin lasts more than a couple years, we'll see interesting things: Artificial intelligence algorithms applied to the market...

As long as you can recognize someone else's pattern, you can program something yourself to take full advantage of it (and knock off the other player).

Aside from that: If you don't like HFT or retarded fake walls, start your own exchange and limit transactions to one every five minutes and hide all the bids/asks

Ticket raised :)

Tacotime, you're right, but for the moment allowing your market to be obliterated by individuals will keep other investors away.....no investors....no market to be kept free in the first place.

As for other exchanges....as long as Gox is the gold standard in the early days, BTC's development overall is tied in to it for good or bad, we are free to go to other exchanges(who are nowhere near as liquid and quite shit tbh), but if Gox don't protect this as a fledgling market, at best it will take longer to develop, at worst it will deplete confidence.

I agree with chodpaba.

Transparency in the order book is not the issue.

It is the overall professionalism and proactivity of the big exchanges that is not (yet) keeping up with the development.

I'm always curious when I read these threads.  Exactly how would bots be prevented?

Does the existence of things like curl (http://curl.haxx.se/), or various schemes for breaking CAPTCHAs change your plan at all?

Are you at all bothered that banning bots (and enforcing the ban!) would mostly hurt legitimate vendors that need to hedge their exposure so they can continue to operate?  Or that the big traders will have the resources to most easily bypass whatever scheme you suggest?

Eliminate the API's!

You don't think I can write a bot that submits orders through the same website that humans use?  HTML is very easy to parse and interpret.

That is actually not true (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags) ;) But you have a point. It is possible for bots to act even without APIs. I believe that the only way to prevent bot abuse would be to introduce some fees/time interval for cancelling orders or something like that. If that is a good idea or not, I don't know. Aren't forex/stock markets full of bots too?

How is the BTC exchange rate calculated?? anyway

Yeah, if you are new to regex, you shouldn't be trying to parse general HTML with it, but you can generally get away with parsing specific HTML from a given site.  Or, you know, use any of the many tools that will parse HTML for you and give you a nested object with all of the elements, tags and attributes.

If your opponent is actively trying to deny you, you might need to also parse javascript, or even write a javascript simulator.  You might also need to break CAPTCHAs, which isn't hard, because if they get too difficult, they start acting in reverse, where getting it wrong suggests a higher probability that the user is human and getting it right suggests a computer.

Doing it with time or fees actually backfires, because it just means that the spread will be wider and the market less liquid.

I have no objection to fees to account for the load on the servers, or to gently discourage certain practices that lead to excessive loads.  But in general, the people that are against bots are either fighting the wrong thing (they think the depths charts are meaningful), or they are pushing for the wrong solution (they couldn't log in because some server was over loaded).